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The Fan

• Character

The fan, Robert DeNiro, is troubled, volatile and irresponsible from the get-go. Where’s there room for him to do anything but serious damage? While it’s good to jump right in to a story, it doesn’t work well when the main character’s road is so pre-defined. (The exact same problem as Apt Pupil and Falling Down.) It would be better to start the fan’s arc when he is more “normal.” This way, the audience could relate to him because he’d be like so many other passionate sports followers. And by making him psychotic, the movie is really telling the story of a crazy person who just so happens to be a fan, as opposed to a true sports story about a fan who steps out of line.

• Structure/Plot, Logic

A fan of the San Francisco Giants is thrilled that the team has signed a major free agent (Rayburn), but when a slumping Rayburn clashes with another star player on his team, the fan kills that other player thinking it’ll benefit Rayburn’s performance. Say what?! Did anyone accept that? The DeNiro character is established as a baseball fanatic- a Giants fanatic- and even though he’s unstable, it does not make any sense for him to kill the other player when it jeopardizes his team. This is a major path in the movie and I lost interest after that.

• Editing, Little things

While I normally point out the little things in good movies, this issue happens so early in The Fan that I sensed further trouble wasn’t far away. The beginning of a movie is so crucial to setting the mood and style that it must avoid stupid blunders as, in this movie, the fans’s reactions during the home-opener sequence. Many of the shots of their expressions are way out of sync with the on-field action. It’s hard to tell that Rayburn hits a grand slam when they show the fans merely standing and watching, as opposed to cheering. And some of the crowd sound does not match their reactions. With all the people involved in making this movie and with all the testing they did, how did no one spot this?

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